


Beginnings

by squintly



Series: Iteration [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Blood and Gore, Character Death, Gen, Graphic descriptions of injury, I mean it, Loki is seriously an asshole, Loki!Centric, Seriously terrible things, Terrible things, Torture, graphic descriptions of death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-07-08
Updated: 2013-07-08
Packaged: 2017-12-18 04:11:35
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/875476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/squintly/pseuds/squintly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki finds himself in a temporal predicament and reacts badly. Things do not go well for anyone, especially him. </p>
<p>Occurs pre-everything else in the Iteration series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Beginnings

Loki closed his eyes on Asgard, Odin looming over him, tesseract in one hand and staff in the other. 

He opened them to the dim blue light of the laboratory.

Everything was as it had been. Every detail, from the chill of condensation on his skin to the surprised, wary, sickeningly _innocent_ looks on the human’s faces, all the same. The sceptre hummed in his hand. He felt it again, that crystalline power, shivering through every fibre of his being and promising _everything_. The rush was stunning. 

“Sir, please put down the spear,” Fury said, again, the same tone, same inflection, same everything, and just as hilariously underwhelming. Loki looked at him, his pathetic aging body, his scarred ignorant face, and wrote him out of existence. 

“Odin?” he called as he rose, looking heavenward, eyes narrowed against the glare of the blue flames. 

He heard Selvig repeat the name, the useless old fool. Fury and Barton began to advance upon him, slowly, cautiously, hands hovering above the hilts of their useless weapons. 

“Is this your plan?” Loki asked with a laugh. “To strand me amongst my lessers?” 

Fury spoke again. Loki ignored him, turning, searching for the thread, for the thin electric line that would signal the Allfather’s gaze. It did not seem to be there, but Loki had no doubt.

“Or do you seek to give me another chance?” he snarled. “You think I will beg for forgiveness? You think I will _repent_?” 

Once more, Fury spoke, stepping up onto the dais. The arrogant worm, the pathetic _wretch_ dared approach him, _him_ , dared to stand in his shadow and demand answer, demand _calm_ , as if he had no reason to fear. 

But of course, he did not. Loki had not taught him yet.

Loki swung the spear level with Fury’s one good eye and sent power rippling up through his arm and into the warm metal, that glorious, _ecstatic_ swell of energy he remembered so clearly, had been without for so dreadfully long. The director’s head disintegrated into ash and a cloud of gore. 

Loki grinned. 

“I will _never_ repent.”

Then Barton shot him in the throat.

Loki stumbled backwards. He fell to his knees. He didn’t understand. A thousand lumps of copper and lead couldn’t penetrate his skin, let alone one. Warmth spread down through his armour like melting ice. 

He felt no pain. Only a growing darkness, littered with a thousand thousand stars. 

\--- --- ---

The second time hurt. 

He shot Fury first, then Barton, just barely, moving achingly slowly for reasons he couldn’t begin to fathom. Compared to the rest of the toy soldiers he was the wind, but by Asgardian standards he was a stone, moving with the turning of the worlds. It felt a dream. 

Only in dreams there was no pain, and the bullets ricocheting off his armour sent stinging rattles right down to his very bones. 

As he thrust the blade of his scepter into the last warrior’s chest, one slipped through the leather beneath his arm. He felt it, first like the bite of a snake and then, as blood began to fill his lungs, as an aching weight, a burning brand thrust through his skin and into the heart of him, weighing him down, filling him up, draining him, a hole that went both ways. 

He had never felt such pain. He had never felt such weakness. 

As he fell, he saw Selvig fling Fury’s gun away and kneel at the man’s side, shaking him, crying, mourning.

Loki didn’t understand. 

\--- --- ---

The third time the roof collapsed on him. 

 

He managed to kill them all, every single one, with only a fiery line etched across his cheek in return, but not before one of the nameless faceless scientist managed to seal the blast doors. He shot the thick steel with the staff again and again and again, a foreign terror building up inside him until he thought he would burst, but the doors had been built to withstand much stronger forces than that. Each shot barely made a dent, and with each passing second the energy swirling above him condensed, thickened, heavy in the air like the scent of rain. 

At last he broke through, a tiny hole he tore wider with greater difficulty than befitted a god, scrambled through like a rodent. All sense of pride, all dignity, fled before the fear shrieking in his gut. He couldn’t stamp it down, couldn’t begin to, didn’t know how. He was supposed to be better than this.

As he fled down the deserted corridors the energy finally released. He felt an electric wave ripple through him before the concrete shattered, around him, above him, beneath his feet. The world lost all sense of order and he fell into a crushing black abyss, dark and devoid of wonders.

A slab of concrete shattered his legs. The nerves screamed and then went silent as his back snapped under the pressure. In a flicker of dim blue, he saw his own arm, twisted backward, mangled beyond all recognition, blood and bone and meat in a thin leather sack. 

It took a very long time to die.

\--- --- ---

When he found himself on the dais once again, he did not rise. Couldn’t. The horror, the pain, the utter despair froze him in place. 

He had never been afraid of death. There was no reason to be. Little in the universe could kill a god. Mortality was for the mortals, for the weak, for the _insignificant_. 

He could not do that again. _Could not_. He had been battle-scarred, he had seen his own blood, but not the thin seam of fat beneath his skin. Not the bone, strung with tendon and masked by torn muscle fibers, still twitching. He could not choke upon his own blood or feel it gush from a bone-deep wound or shiver in the cold chill as the last of it left him and his heart stopped and the silence boomed. 

Fury and his falcon approached him slowly, asking him questions he couldn’t hear and giving him orders he didn’t care to heed. They didn’t matter. None of it mattered. It was some trick, some simulacrum the Allfather had contrived to punish him for his misdeeds. To show him the error of his ways. 

It was working.

“I yield,” he said, quietly, to the man that was not there. 

Fury responded, the arrogant gnat. Loki did not look up at him, did not move, for fear that Odin would not listen, that Odin would think his words a lie. 

“Your point is made,” he continued. “I shan’t disobey you again.”

Nothing happened. Fury continued to speak, continued to press in on him, but the illusion did not fade. Odin did not respond. Loki remained, kneeling, the dais hard beneath his knees and the endless expanse of rock above pressing down with all its terrible inevitability. 

“Release me,” he asked. 

Odin did not. The fear began to build again as the seconds ticked by. 

“Release me.”

The air thickened around him. There were minutes, merely minutes, before the facility collapsed once more and trapped him under the miles and miles of earth and stone, until he was again pinned breathless, until he tasted iron and dust and saw what he was beneath the skin. 

“Release me!” he screamed, standing, heart thundering, fingers white around the staff, and the bullet passing through one side of his skull and out the other was actually a relief.

\--- --- ---

Odin would not let him go until his point was made, that much was clear. If only Loki knew what that point was.

He went back to the beginning, to the first time, the _true_ first time, when everything was real and it had all seemed so easy. It took a couple tries before he learnt the correct path, ducking and dodging bullets where before he had ignored them altogether, but after the terror of the collapse the guns didn’t frighten him anymore. 

When he pressed the tip of the sceptre to Barton’s heart, he was _sure_. He could do it right this time. He could _win_. Perhaps this wasn’t a punishment after all—this was another chance, an opportunity to undo his mistakes, to _conquer_ in his father’s name and finally make Odin proud. He could do it.

Hill shot him in the back as they drove away. 

And then Fury riddled him with holes from the helicopter, two in his leg and one in his stomach, unbearably painful until he bled out and the warm blanket of death descended. 

And then they made it, they escaped, and Barton found them a safe house and Selvig began his work and hope sprung anew and he fell down the stairs, head cracking open against the concrete floor.

But he could fix it. Every time he got a little further. Victory was inevitable. All he had to do was keep on trying.

The Other seemed unnerved by his patience. 

“You are changed, Asgardian.”

“Am I?” 

“You fear no longer,” it gurgled. “You think you are beyond our grasp?”

“Not at all,” he replied, letting the Other scuttle around him. 

“If you fail…” the Other began, familiar, but no longer frightening. “If the tesseract is kept from us… there will be no realm, no barren moon, no crevasse where he cannot find you.”

Loki smiled, small, to keep it from the vertebrate thing behind him. The threats were empty, now. The Other meant them, he had no doubt—only now, he would succeed, or he would die and try again. There was no middle ground.

“You think you know pain,” the Other hissed into his ear. Loki braced for the agony to come. “He will make you long for something _sweeter still_.”

The Other’s two-thumbed hand pressed against the side of his face and the world went searing white. His head pounded and ached and his stomach turned, but it was nothing. The first time it had felt like everything, like his skull was being torn apart from the inside out. Now that it actually _had_ been, had been shot and crushed and split like an egg, all the Other had to offer was a dull ache. 

Loki _did_ know pain. 

There was nothing the Other or his dark master could do to him. Not anymore.

\--- --- ---

Stuttgart did not go well.

The first time, the Captain slammed his shield into Loki’s face so hard he shattered bone and Loki lay on the pavement breathing blood for almost a minute while Rogers alternated between demanding to know where the tesseract was and apologizing, waiting for an ambulance that would never come. After that, Loki made sure to pull his blows, lest the Captain overestimate his strength. That seemed to work fairly well. Stark was harder to handle. His opening salvo knocked Loki back against the steps hard enough to break his back. No matter what Loki did, the man never _stopped_ —it seemed the man of iron did not share his commander’s reservations. In the end, it seemed easiest to simply surrender when Agent Romanov asked him to. 

And then there was his ‘brother’.

Thor accidently strangled him in mid-air the first time. Broke his back the second. Knocked the wind out of him the third, but only because Loki rolled into his slide, flipping head over heels and almost going off the edge of the cliff. 

“Where is the tesseract?” Thor demanded, seemingly oblivious to the shuddering ripples coursing through Loki’s veins. 

He couldn’t respond. Couldn’t breathe, a curious feeling he didn’t care for at all, desperate and terrifying and so close to the crush of stone he thought he would die and almost did. Thor stormed towards him, all self-righteous fury and rage. 

“Where?” Thor shouted. 

“I—missed you too,” Loki choked out, trying to stick to his lines despite the trembling pain in his chest. 

Thor paused. The brute was more observant that Loki had thought. 

“Brother? What ails you?”

“Nothing that concerns you,” Loki gasped, finally mustering the strength to rise laboriously to his feet. 

Thor reached out and grabbed his arm, helping him up. Loki could tell he was trying to be gentle, but gentle for an Asgardian and gentle for a… whatever he was now, were two very different things. He could feel the man’s grip pressing bruises into his flesh.

“You are my brother,” Thor replied. 

“No, you’re not!” Loki snapped as he pulled away, trying to get things back on track, trying to quell the wave of nauseous rage boiling in his gut at Thor’s lies. “The Allfather told you of my true parentage, did he not?”

“We were raised together,” Thor pleaded, letting Loki slip painfully away down the slope, as dull and ineffectual as always. “We played together, we fought together. Do you remember none of that?”

“I remember a shadow,” Loki said. The wave cooled. They were just words now, whether he meant them or not. “Living in the shade of your greatness. I remember you tossing me into an abyss, I who was and should be king.”

“So you take the world I love as recompense for your imagined slights?”

Afterwards, when Thor had finally gotten his way and dragged Loki home, he had apologized for that. He had apologized for many things. He hadn’t understood, he’d said, until Loki was gone, what role he had played. The court jester, the trickster, the butt of every joke and the bearer of blame for every problem, every accident, every mistake. Loki’s slights weren’t imagined. Misconstrued, misremembered, perhaps, but not imagined.

“No,” Thor continued before Loki could reply, as always, as ever. “The Earth is under my protection, Loki.”

Loki did not laugh. His ribs ached and his breath would not come. His words came out bitter, stronger, like teeth.

“And you’re doing a _marvelous_ job with that. The humans slaughter each other in droves while you idly fret. I mean to _rule_ them, and why should I not?”

“You think yourself above them,” Thor said, as if he did not, as if when push metaphorically came to shrug he didn’t see the Midgardian hordes as pathetic and weak as Loki did. 

“Yes,” Loki replied.

“Then you miss the truth of ruling, brother. The throne would suit you ill.”

The script said storm away. The script said shout. Loki could not, would not do either of those things. Everything hurt, and he’d done this all before, and there was even less point now than there had been the first time. Everything Loki said, Thor would always think wrong. 

“I have seen worlds you’ve never known about,” Loki said, looking Thor in his big nauseating eyes, full of judgment and false pain. “I have grown in my exile. I—“

Thor was watching him. Thor was listening.

And Loki understood.

Odin had sent Thor to Midgard to learn patience. To learn temperance. Thor had instead learned love, but that was not the intent. The intent was a calm hand, something neither of them had. 

But Loki could learn. He was learning already, bit by bit. 

“I have changed, brother,” he said, even, so much so that furrows appeared between his brother’s brows. 

But Thor did not believe him. He begged and he pleaded for Loki to give up, to come home. Loki laughed in his face. 

For once in all his years, Loki felt the better of the two.

\--- --- ---

It took time. It took effort. There was pain. 

Loki counted the deaths. Twenty became thirty became forty. He came to know the burning agony of laser fire, the thundering crash of a hammer against his ribcage, the sickening slide of an arrow through his eye and out the other side. One by one, he conquered them all. He _conquered death_.

And every time the answer was the same—calm. 

He remained calm when Romanov questioned him and she went away disappointed. Nothing changed, but it made him feel better. 

He remained calm when Coulson pulled that ridiculous gun on him and stabbed him straight through the heart, killing him instantly. That didn’t change anything either, besides saving him some bruises and broken ribs. 

He remained calm when the staff didn’t work on Stark, stabbing him just above the circle of light instead. 

And he won.

_He won_.

With the Avengers busy fighting off Stark, the Chitauri were free to do as they pleased. Manhattan crumbled. The beast was buried under a thousand tonnes of rubble, the soldier was decapitated with his own shield, the bitch found herself alone and bleeding in the gutter where she belonged.1 

It was glorious. It was _magnificent_. It was everything he’d imagined it would be, everything he had ever wanted.

Odin would come for him now, surely. Odin would release him. He’d learned his lesson, he’d proven himself worthy. Odin would come.

Loki stood at the top of Stark Tower and waited. The sky turned grey with smoke and the streets ran red with blood and there was nothing anyone could do about it, not even his brother, swinging away fruitlessly at the endless hordes. He’d _won_.

The artificial sun blooming over the horizon caught him completely by surprise.

Loki closed his eyes on the blinding light, the burn, cooking him from the inside out faster than his brain could process the pain. 

He opened them to the dim blue light of the laboratory.

Odin didn’t come.

Odin never came.

Loki didn’t understand.

\--- --- ---

Loki killed them. All of them. Each and every one.

He hunted them down one by one, one iteration at a time, and destroyed them in the cruelest, most painful ways he could imagine. He tore the light from Stark’s chest and skinned his woman alive while he watched, helpless. He chained the Captain to the floor of a room full of rats and slit his belly open, watching the abomination heal even as the rodents ate into his flesh. He trapped the beast in concrete from the waist down and dropped him into the depths of the sea, where the weight of the water would be enough to crush even the brute into blood and bone and paste. 

He fulfilled his promise to Natasha. Twice. Once for her, and once for Barton. 

He saved his brother for last. 

After Coulson lost his second eye to the candle flame, he told Loki where Thor’s precious little slag had been secreted away. He found her. And when Thor threw him down upon that mountain top, he found her too, in carefully arranged pieces.

Loki slit his throat while he screamed.

He had thought he knew pain. He had thought he knew hatred. He did not. The pit was endless, and he would never, ever stop falling. 

When he was finished and Odin’s favourite son lay cold and still at his feet, Loki spoke to him, one last time. 

“Whatever lesson you aimed to teach, you failed,” he said to the cool night air. “I will never repent. I will never beg for your forgiveness.”

The night did not answer. The bright streak of Stark’s suit cut ever closer through the clearing sky. 

“I do not want it,” Loki continued, pulling out one of his throwing knives and twirling it idly in his hands. “I have done nothing wrong.”

Stark spotted him and banked. The black metal slid beneath his fingers like silk. 

“All that I am, I am because of you.”

As Stark pulled up to land, Loki pressed the blade against his own throat and pulled. It cut deep, and hot, and glorious. Loki had never felt freer.

And then he opened his eyes.

**Author's Note:**

> 1-- I hate this line. I hate this line. I hate this line. It is horrible and I hate it and I hate Loki for making me write it, you awful sexist bastard. Hurry up and get nice already.


End file.
